North America Gets Ready
The launch of Nimiq 2 by Telesat Canada signals the beginning of a new era in North American satellite ventures, as a significant amount of commercial Ka-band capacity lights up. With Echostar 9's launch date in mid-year and, later in 2003, Anik F2 preparing to head skywards, the stage is set for a new range of broadband multimedia services.
Anik F2, in addition to C- and Ku-band capacity, will carry 45 Ka-band circular spotbeams, with 30 licensed to Wildblue Communications and 15 dedicated to Telesat's Canadian customers. Total throughput will range between 3 and 4 Gbs.
"Our success will be determined by how well we price and package our terminals. We have an ultimate target of less than $500 for the consumer market, and we have a Ku-band terminal for under $1,000 in mind as our target in the enterprise market, which is our primary objective," says Paul Bush, Telesat Canada's vice president of business development. "Telesat has RFPs (Request For Proposals) out to vendors for the building of three gateways and terminals in Canada. Our mission here is to build volume and drop prices."
Brad Greenwald, spokesman for Wildblue, said his team was keeping things close to its vest, and the recent decisions to invest by Liberty Media, Intelsat and the NRTC, among others, is opening up a new chapter as the company prepares to win over an estimated 30-35 million unserved residential and SOHO customers.
"A number of milestones, including the granting by the FCC of a change of control motion in March, have been met and we are now working on the paperwork to officially close the deal," says Greenwald.
There is no firm launch date for Wildblue 1, which is to follow Anik F2. Work on gateways by Andrew was restarted after being put on hold several months ago and both DOCSIS and DVB-RCS interface standards were on the list.
"Our belief is that in order to attract a consumer market, you need to charge less than $50 per month, and that CPE [customer premises equipment] prices have to come down to a couple of hundred dollars," says Greenwald.
On Anik F2, a Boeing 702, a half dozen wideband 492-MHz transponders will beam traffic to the six planned gateways--three each in the United States and Canada--relaying multiple MF-TDMA return carriers from users grouped into six to eight beams in the process.
The F2 gateways use a series of 56-MHz transponders powered by thirty-one, 90-watt TWTAs to access users in each spotbeam, with 17 spotbeams designated as heavy rain beams for customers in the eastern half of North America with a single 90-watt TWTA assigned to each beam. The other 14 TWTAs support a pair of beams each.
BeamLink, described as an advanced, flexible multiplexing subsystem, can be adapted to meet the requirements of numerous different traffic patterns amongst users in each group of beams, while the SpaceMux onboard processor will demodulate uplink MF-TDMA carriers, remultiplex the packets, and then remodulate the TDM downlink. Bear in mind that achieving true five to six times frequency reuse demands adequate spatial isolation at all times. The spotbeam coverage must also cope with the ever present possibility of rain fade, which will require variable uplink power at both the terminal and the hub.
"We want to try and do most of the adjusting at the hub and we will use advanced techniques to ensure continuous operations, even with rain fade, by stepping down speeds of operation if conditions warrant it. That means taking the return channel speed at 500 kbs and easing it back to 384 kbs or even 194 kbs," says Bush. "The power levels on F2 are 55-58 dBW. These power levels, coupled with adaptive coding, will enable us to provide a competitive Internet service to consumer and enterprise customers."
Game Plans Emerging
Both SES Americom and Loral Skynet which has now absorbed its Cyberstar unit, are pursuing the Ka-band market, but both seem to be headed in very different directions in the process. SES Americom has successfully leased its entire block of Ku-band capacity, along with one polarity of the full Ka-band payload on AMC 15 to Echostar Communications Corp.
Prior to December 2003, Echostar plans to use its new Space Systems/Loral-built Echostar 9 to start testing the Ka-band waters. Echostar would not divulge exactly what sort of testing would go on. At the same time, the status of its Ka-band Visionstar project is uncertain, as Echostar's request for an FCC extension has yet to be approved.
AMC 15, with its payload of two dozen 36 MHz Ku-band transponders and a dozen 125 MHz Ka-band spotbeams, is scheduled for launch in August 2004.
"This validates our concept of Americom2Home (A2H). We are essentially real estate developers and we have just got a very large tenant in our first building," says Kevin Smythe, senior vice president of residential satellite services at SES Americom. "We are in the process of modifying both AMC 15 and AMC 16 to make them more DTH-friendly. We have characterized A2H as replicating what SES Astra has done already in Europe with respect to wholesaling capacity to DTH providers."
While there is no firm launch date for Telstar 8, a Ku-band forward channel/Ka-band return channel-equipped satellite, Loral Skynet expects it to be built by the end of this year. It will open the door to spotbeam-based services using DVB-RCS, or whatever standard a service provider decides to implement, according to Robert Hedinger, executive vice president of sales, marketing and client services at Loral Skynet.
"Our plan is to extend our Ka-band capabilities on Telstar 8 with additional Ka-band capacity as the market develops. We want to time our infrastructure rollout so that [it] is there when it is truly needed," says Hedinger. "We can start a wide range of IP-based and VPN services at Ku-band and migrate them to Ka-band when the time is right.
"We are frequency independent. We do not look at the market as strictly a Ka-band phenomenon. Instead, we are following the market in an incremental fashion. We see an evolutionary process unfolding in terms of implementing next generation VSAT solutions with broader dynamic bandwidth allocations and hubbed networking capabilities," Hedinger adds.
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